The Speech That Kills the World
Countering the Supreme Court’s Right-Wing strategy
NOTE: Within this text, wherever gender is not key to the explanation, I am using the Elverson ey/em construction of the Spivak Pronouns.
Before doing some research, I was convinced that there were grounds to impeach three Supreme Court justices. I believed that Roberts and Alito had issued incompetent decisions that were clearly beyond the evidence provided and that Thomas had put himself in a position of conflict of interest in several cases. These are not illegal per sé (go figure); but, they are not consistent with the Constitutionally established bar for a federal judge which is this:
The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour …
This makes sense since a federal judge has a lifetime appointment. It seems a fairly light requirement that their privileged tenure be one of good behavior. Over the life of this Good Behavior Clause, there has been much controversy. Thomas Jefferson believed that this clause meant what the average person might believe: It should be easier to end a lifetime appointment than a four year appointment (as argued by Saikrishna Prakash and Steven Douglas Smith in their article How to Remove a Federal Judge). Alexander Hamilton, on the other hand…
